Azure Cloud Shell Button WordPress Plugin

Azure Cloud Shell is the web based cmd line tool provided by Microsoft that allows you to launch either a Bash or PowerShell command line in your browser, that is already authenticated to Azure with your credentials and contains all the command line tools you need to interact with Azure, it even includes other tools like Teraform, Ansible, Git etc.

When Cloud Shell was launched it was only available in the Azure portal, however it is now possible to launch an instance of cloud shell from pretty much any web page by including a clickable link with some Javascript to launch a new window and load Cloud Shell. This means it’s now possible to include a link to Cloud Shell right along side the code samples or snippets in your blog, article or tutorial, so the user can immediately try them out in their own shell.

To make this even easier for those who use WordPress as their platform of choice, I have created a plugin for the WordPress Tiny MCE editor (the default editor for WordPress) that will insert a cloud shell button directly into your posts, like so: